


Becoming (the bite that bites back harder)

by newtypeshadow



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: BAMF Stiles, Beta Derek Hale, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Monster of the Week, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Stiles is basically Peter Parker, and every supernatural creature that bites him is a radioactive spider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 09:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15771342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: Stiles’s BAMFtastic journey from human to supernatural one man army.





	Becoming (the bite that bites back harder)

**Author's Note:**

> I love overpowered, secret BAMF!Stiles fics something fierce. I hope you enjoy this despite the liberties I took with canon.
> 
> Fic inspired in part by [the gorgeous image "Born to Darkness" by wycked](https://www.deviantart.com/the-savage-garden/art/born-to-darkness-17756128).

Stiles is human. Out of everyone in the pack proper, being human and nothing else is his _thing_. He is the mundane man with a plan, the hyper, mouthy shit who protects his friends by putting the pieces together and planning missions that aren’t suicidal, then stays out of the way when the claws come out.

Mostly stays out of the way.

Okay, not really.

Peter didn’t bite Stiles in the woods, he bit Scott. When Peter offered Stiles the bite later, and Stiles declined, they didn’t bring it up again—to each other or anyone else. Stiles won’t ever take the bite. He knows what happened to Paige, he saw what happened to Jackson, he knows not everyone is meant for werewolfy athleticism and physical perfection and fangs, and he’s not risking leaving his dad all alone just to try, he is _not_. He’s not the party meat shield, he’s the party…planner? Maybe the bard, or whatever you’d call the squishy, entirely human dude and sometimes hype-man. Point is, he’s the official entirely-human, non-supernatural-adjacent-legacy dude in the pack, and he plans to stay that way.

When Deaton tells Stiles he can manipulate mountain ash because he’s a Spark, they all mostly let it go. There are no offers to train Stiles, there is no sharing of information, so Stiles figures it isn’t terribly important, and anyway he’s got more important shit to do like making sure his friends don’t get murdered through stupid heroics no one was asking for or required, goddammit, and seriously, how many times did he have to tell them they needed a plan before they rushed off into almost-certain death? Ugh, werewolves.

The pack eventually stabilizes, and Stiles leaves Beacon Hills for Quantico—with a brief intermission back in Beacon Hills, wherein he’s surprised Scott’s “plans” haven’t gotten _everyone_ in his pack killed, je- _zus_ god—but during that interlude, he and Derek seem to have come to an understanding. Maybe it’s that Stiles isn’t a minor anymore, or maybe it’s that Derek’s much better adjusted now that he’s not an alpha stuck living in the hellmouth that murdered his family, or maybe they both just miss the security of living close enough to have each other’s backs, because after Stiles finishes his FBI training, he and Derek end up sharing a penthouse in Manhattan. Derek outright owns the place; Stiles’s rent is buying groceries and ensuring they don’t live on freezer food. And, if he’s reading things right, he’s pretty sure both of them are choking on sexual tension neither will un-compartmentalize. Anyway, Derek is a werewolf—he can smell how Stiles feels, so if he’s interested, he’s welcome to say something. Biologically, the ball’s in his court and always has been.

In the meantime, life’s been quiet. They’re casually in touch with the local supernatural community, the Avery pack is treating them well—Derek thinks they’re itching to have Stiles, which Stiles thinks is utter bullshit—and while they no longer live on a freaking supernatural creature feature _beacon_ , Stiles stays up to his ears in researching and building an electronic bestiary that’s tagged up, down, backwards, and sideways, and has citations and anecdotes and references to literal tomes, with private, Stiles-only notes on where to find each and every resource used therein.

Okay, maybe the Avery pack _is_ itching to have Stiles.

Just like every other pack Stiles has visited for his pet project, not that he tells Derek since he gets antsy enough when Stiles travels without him. To be honest, Stiles is antsy when he meets packs without Derek at his back too, but that’s his own problem.

It’s still an adjustment realizing packs want Stiles, squishy human, to join them even though he’s determined to stay a squishy human. It’s still weird to him that packs go out of their way to get and stay on his good side, and by extension Derek’s, not for Derek, but for Stiles. The FBI trained him to fight, but he’s still no match for a werewolf without a gun or a knife or an instrument of blunt force trauma, and he knows it.

These are the things Stiles is thinking about on his way home from the Avery homestead upstate.

These are the things Stiles is thinking about when he gets into a taxi that he wants to get back out of as soon as he’s closed himself and his duffel inside.

These are the things Stiles has back-burnered as he tries to catalog what about the taxi and its driver is raising the hairs on the back of his neck.

These are the things Stiles laments when the taxi pulls into a deserted alley miles from his apartment, and between one blink and the next learns vampires exist, and that their bites hurt like hell, but only for an instant.

The vampire dumps him and his duffel in the alley and leaves. Stiles feels sluggish, like he’s been drugged, and his memory of the attack is starting to go jagged. He thinks there must be something in vampire saliva that’s doing it—Stiles survived a Nogitsune, he fucking knows now when someone else is inside his fucking head, influencing his thoughts, and this was nothing like that—this feels strictly chemical, just like the pain beginning to flare down from his neck.

Derek’s going to be worried when Stiles isn’t home in twenty minutes. He’s obsessive about being at home when Stiles gets back from a trip. Stiles is pretty sure Derek is creepy enough when he wants to be that he could find Stiles’s heartbeat or his scent if he got close enough, so while Stiles stares at the lengthening black lines pushing down into his hands, feels the poisonous burn in his veins that he knows, in his lizard brain, is going to kill him, he tells himself Derek will find him before it’s too late, because Derek _always_ has his back. Stiles _believes_ that.

So he waits for Derek in a paralyzed body that will _not_ be dying anytime soon, not today motherfucker, and by the time he hears a familiar howl he’s strong enough to call for Derek, and keep up a stream of hoarse-voiced chatter so Derek can find him faster, and when Derek does, the black veins have receded from Stiles’s hands.

Derek takes him home.

Stiles makes Derek record what he says Stiles smells like, makes him take pictures of Stiles’s neck and the black veins on his arms and chest, and the pallor of his skin, and then Stiles lets Derek help him bathe because he still has no fine motor control and can’t stand up on his own. He won’t let Derek take him to a hospital.

Derek sleeps in full shift next to Stiles that night; that form has the best sense of smell, he says, and he’ll be able to tell if Stiles is taking a turn much more quickly. “Ugh,” Stiles grumbles when, an hour later, he’s still awake, “I’m getting superpowers out of this. If I don’t wake up like fucking Spiderman from that bite I’m gonna be super pissed.” The wolf chuffs at him and Stiles grins. “Shut it, I’ll be an awesome Daywalker,” he says.

He’s almost drifted off when he thinks he hears a footstep: the familiar scrape of the vampire’s shoe on gritty pavement right by his head. Stiles panics, breaths coming in short and sharp, heartbeat rocketing from slow to thundering in the space of that single sound, and Stiles can’t see shit, everything’s dark, and he’s sure he’s trapped back in that alley, paralyzed, that he dreamed Derek had found him and now he’s woken up.

Stiles feels the ground shaking, and then a furry head nuzzles his face and neck, licks his cheek and over the vampire bite on his neck—a bite that, strangely enough, hadn’t bled when the vampire left—and the creature smells like musk and damp leaves and the sharp of woods late at night, and blue eyes flash at him in the darkness, and Stiles can suddenly breathe again.

He falls asleep only because Derek stretches a paw across his chest and nestles his large, black muzzle in the crook of Stiles’s neck. Feeling Derek so close means it’s safe to go to sleep, so Stiles does.

The next morning, the bite mark is gone.

So is the scar on his foot from the bullet wound he’d acquired clearing Derek’s name from FBI suspicion, and, he will discover later, the ache in his bones he’d felt ever after when it was going to rain.

All of Stiles’s scars are gone, in fact, and he’s smelling things he shouldn’t be smelling, and hearing things he shouldn’t be hearing, and his night vision is better than Derek’s. He doesn’t crave blood or feel like shit in the sun, and he doesn’t gain the muscle definition of a Greek god. Derek says he still smells entirely human, and Stiles still bruises like a peach (even if they don’t stick around like before), so it’s clear whatever that vampire bite did, Stiles is still very much a squishy human—albeit with superpowers.

Stiles can’t find anything in his research about vampire bites having Spiderman-esque effects on their victims. What he finds is that vampires can bite non-lethally, but their poisoned bites kill one hundred percent of their victims, and those black veins showed that lethal vampire poison spreading through his system; by all accounts, Stiles should be dead.

He and Derek keep the vampire bite and Stiles’s new vampire superpowers (“Stop calling them superpowers, Stiles.”) a secret; they don’t talk about it anywhere someone could overhear without taking multi-layered technological and supernatural precautions first.

When Derek demands to accompany Stiles on all future Bestiary trips, Stiles is pretty sure Derek could smell his relief. Stiles isn’t very good at identifying emotions by smell yet—he and Derek are still working on that—but the furrow between Derek’s eyebrows relaxes when Stiles feels that wash of relief, so he’s pretty sure that’s how that went down.

Secretly having super-senses is both incredibly helpful and incredibly embarrassing when around other packs, but Stiles is compartmentalizing that. Unfortunately, being able to smell Derek’s arousal randomly around the apartment has clarified nothing about their relationship; super-senses can apparently only take you so far.

Stiles finds a footnote about Sparks being able to do impossible things in the McGuinness pack library, but nothing else. He hasn’t thought about being a Spark in almost a decade, but seeing as he’s no longer in survival mode, he starts to get curious.

There is precious little information about Sparks. Stiles even goes to Deaton instead of visiting his dad during a six-hour layover, but he’s as enigmatic as ever, and tells him fuck all he didn’t already know, so that side trip was a bust.

But it’s fine. Maybe Stiles is like Lydia—immune to vampire bites or something, but not entirely—but also still completely, squishily human. Stiles has always been a weird example of what humanity has to offer, so turning into Spiderman seems kinda on brand.

Then he gets bitten by the Leoni pack alpha entirely non-consensually, to force Stiles (and Derek) into their ruthless pack of alpha-male-koolaid-drinking fucksticks, while Derek is pretty firmly staked to the ground with wolfsbane-infused wood—and the weirdness really kicks in.

Stiles twitches on the ground while Derek looks on in horror, and makes himself smile. “I’m totally getting werewolf superpowers outta this,” he tells Derek. He knows the two of them will be fine. He’ll get superpowers and he and Derek will kick this pack to the curb and report their asses to the werewolf council—which is apparently a thing, Stiles laughed for days when he found out, and laughed even harder whenever Derek’s face twitched in response—and Stiles will steal their entire fucking library as compensation and he and Derek will go back home and probably repress this like the grown men they are.

Derek’s smile looks as forced as Stiles’s felt, and he stinks of pain and banked rage and sadness, but also somehow still smells really, really good, like something Stiles would willingly drown in. “Don’t call them superpowers,” Derek says. It makes Stiles choke out a laugh.

“Shut up,” the Leoni alpha snaps, and cracks Derek’s head with a heavy fist.

Stiles.

Sees.

 _Red_.

When the haze clears, Stiles is holding Derek’s healed hand, and everyone from the Leoni pack is on the ground and sticking up at odd angles. Stiles remembers being a jagged blur of motion and fury and teeth and claws and…smoke? Fog? He feels like he was airborne and in control for at least a little while. Derek’s looking at him with awe. His eyes flash blue.

Stiles’s vision goes red automatically, just for a moment, and Derek yanks Stiles into his chest and laughs hysterically and doesn’t let go. They huddle there far too long, surrounded by corpses, holding tight to each other.

They’re kind of together after that.

They don’t tell anyone what went down, and Stiles takes the Leoni library home, and the Leoni pack massacre remains a mystery when it’s discovered a week later until the werewolf council claims responsibility. Turns out the Leoni pack’s innumerable crimes had them slated for death. Conspiracy theorists insist the real culprits are still unknown, and posit the Leoni pack died messing with the wrong people. In any case, no one in the know is looking too hard for the real culprits—or the book thieves.

Stiles can’t do the beta shift or anything, but apparently he can turn into a wolf now? _Dracula_ says that’s a vampire thing, not just a wolf thing, but vampires are extremely reticent about themselves, so Stiles and Derek just go with it, and they run together on full moons when they can get out of the city, and their sex life is awesome even before they’re attacked by that incubus.

Stiles’s fingers can do the claw thing, and his teeth can go razor sharp and slightly elongated, but, again, they’re not sure if that’s a wolf thing or a vampire thing. Stiles keeps the notes about his accumulating weirdnesses secret and encrypted and locked down all to hell, just like his bestiary—but unlike his bestiary, only Derek knows those notes exist, and Derek’s added some himself.

Derek says Stiles still smells entirely human. Neither of them is sure whether he’s still squishy.

A mermaid tries to drown him for a non-consensual mating ritual, and Stiles gets gills and Aquaman powers. He doesn’t come out looking like Jason Momoa, but still: Aquaman powers. He can fucking talk to lobsters in restaurant tanks. (He stops eating lobsters for a while.)

There’s an attempted demon possession that knocks loose some Nogitsune memories, and both those power sets hit him over a memorable week where they went through eleven fire extinguishers and Stiles lit the apartment with foxfire orbs for three days straight.

He gets Thor powers visiting home with Derek—some electricity kid tries to steal his life force or something, they’re not entirely sure, they just know it backfired spectacularly. The electricity kid died in the backlash, and no one else was there except Derek, so Scott and his dad don’t understand why Derek rage-quits the room when Stiles puts on _Thor: Ragnerok_ , and why, after Stiles drags him back and sits on him for the whole movie, Stiles cracks up every time Thor’s lightning shows up.

After the movie ends, and they’ve implemented their natural and supernatural security measures, and sworn Scott and Stiles’s dad to secrecy and complete electronic silence on the matter, Stiles and Derek explain Stiles’s penchant for getting bitten by radioactive spiders a la Peter Parker in Spiderman. Scott and Stiles’s dad are baffled, impressed, relieved, and annoyed they weren’t told sooner, in fluctuating measure. Stiles and Derek get back home with no one else the wiser.

Stiles still smells entirely human. When Derek tells him the human is a lie, Stiles cackles and says no, he’s just poisoned, and Derek’s smile lights up his face, and Stiles can’t help climbing him like a tree and kissing him down onto the floor for two mutual orgasms and the lust-filled promise they’ll play _Portal 2_ when Stiles gets off work on Friday.

Deaton said way back when that Spark powers were based on belief, and Stiles comes to appreciate that more and more as he becomes a one-man supernatural arsenal that’s still entirely—if un-squishily—human. Stiles _knows_ getting attacked by a monster of the week will give him that monster’s superpowers, and so it happens every time, until years later he and Derek open their motel room door to a horde of thirty zombies, and Stiles shuts it with a sigh. “It’s zombies. Go back to sleep, babe, I’ll take care of it and be back in, like, two minutes.”

Derek snorts and gets out of bed, all shirtless and distracting and with a ring glinting off his finger that still makes Stiles giddy. He gives Stiles a sleepy, contented kiss as the banging starts on their door and the walls around it, then pushes Stiles towards it with a grin. “No,” he says, “I like to watch you work.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second _Teen Wolf_ fanfic, and second posted on AO3, so if you enjoyed it ~~and want to help ease my anxious paranoia about writing with more fanfiction than show under my belt as of yet~~ , do leave kudos and/or a comment to let me know. ♥


End file.
